KENNETH STEWART: Why does the census ask about race?

SAN ANGELO, Texas - As chairman of the local Complete Count Committee, many people have shared their annoyances about the census with me during the past weeks. A complaint I hear frequently is the cynicism about the Census Bureau being an arm of “big government” that makes unwanted intrusions into people’s rights and privacy.

It is a relevant point that I have thought about sincerely because the idea of big government prying into every corner of my life is as disturbing to me as it is to others. For me, though, any shade of this cynicism melts away with a full grasp of the purpose of the census in our national system of government.

At the very moment of the birth of our nation, a time when there were few federal government programs and only four cabinet-level departments (State, Treasury, War, Justice), there was a mandate to do the census. Barely a year after taking office, our first president launched the census in 1790 under the direction of then secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson.

Big government was hardly an apt description for the times, even though some Americans worried about it then as we do today. Census-taking ranked high on the original national agenda in those early days precisely because the Founders viewed it as a key tool to assure equal representation to all people.

The Founders might have given census responsibility to the states, but individual states would then have real incentives to exaggerate their population counts. So it makes sense that the Founders decided the federal government needs to be responsible for this activity, no matter how small or large the government may be at any time. It is undeniable that the census is a creation of representative government, not one of big government.

A good reason for counting the people is one thing, but the specific questions in the census are another matter that frequently triggers irritation. Why, for example, does the census ask, “Is the Person of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin,” and why does it ask, “What is the Person’s race?”

These questions tap deep emotional responses. One man told me recently that it is “racist” in his opinion for the Census Bureau to ask these questions.

The easy way to answer is to point out how the numbers from these questions are used. In the case of the questions on Hispanic origin and racial identity, the results are used by federal, state and local governments to monitor compliance with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.

This answer, however, fails to satisfy the question for many people. They may not know the provisions of these laws, or they may not approve of the requirements anyway. It just looks like “double-talk” to a lot of people.

The truth is that the census does have a purpose going beyond the math of equally representing people in government. The census strives to reflect who we are as a nation of people. This means the census works to shine light on our similarities and differences, our shared and diverging interests, and issues that bring us together as well as those that divide us.

Certainly, matters related to race and national origin have much to do with “who we are” in this sense.

Racial differences and issues run deeply through our national life together today and throughout history. Consequently, every census since 1790 has asked about race in one way or another, and questions about Hispanic origin were added to the census as the number of people migrating to the U.S. from Mexico, Cuba and other Latin American nations built up over the last century.

The original census distinguished between “Free Whites” and “Slaves” because the original Constitution demanded that a slave be counted only as three-fifths of a person. After the Civil War and ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868, the census for several decades asked about “color” to distinguish groups including blacks, mulattoes, Chinese and Indians that people prevalently thought should be treated separately and segregated from whites.

Nowadays, the census takes a completely different approach because of changes in our nation’s thinking about civil rights beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. For one thing, the census now allows people to choose their own answers to all census questions, including those on race and Hispanic origin. Before 1970, census enumerators marked the answers according to rules set down by the government.

Allowing people to self-select their answers is a significant change to the census, but more important is that the reason for asking about race and Latino origin has changed. No longer does the census ask these things to help support segregation, or to target groups for legal action and restricted civil rights, or to identify immigrants for deportation.

A few people may be attracted to some of these ideas, but the vast majority of Americans do not want their government to act in these ways.

As a result of the changes from the 1950s and 1960s, Americans decided that government should work to protect the civil rights of all the people in the nation. That decision was codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That, also, is why the census numbers today are used to monitor compliance with these laws intended to combat discrimination and to assure equality in voting.

Each person is entitled to express their opinion about what the census asks. Each person also should answer all the questions completely and honestly, however. Every person in America should participate proudly in this picture of who we are, and how far we have come.

Kenneth L. Stewart is chairman of the Census 2010 Complete Count Committee for the city of San Angelo and Tom Green County. He also is a professor of sociology at ASU.